Area children waited to see the black-footed ferret, a rare Texas Panhandle native once believed to be extinct, was on display during the official opening of the Bill and Alice O'Brien Education Center at the Amarillo Zoo on May 23.

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A furry posse may be headed to High Lonesome to clean up prairie dog towns.

State and federal agencies will take public comment Thursday on a proposal to introduce black-footed ferrets into about 1,000 acres of Rita Blanca National Grasslands in northwest Dallam County as part of a national effort to rebuild the endangered species.

The ferrets primarily eat prairie dogs. Managing a reintroduction site would include keeping prairie dogs from spreading to adjoining land and keeping a supply of them as a food source.

“It’s tricky, but very doable,” said Sean Kyle, a wildlife diversity biologist for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. “We’re not proposing it happen everywhere. It will be very restricted sites managed as ferret habitat.”

Rita Blanca is a checkerboard of parcels totaling 90,000 acres. The High Lonesome area of Rita Blanca is the largest contiguous piece of land in the grasslands at 40,000 acres.

In 1980, the species was thought to be extinct due to changes on the prairie from Canada to Mexico.

“We plowed up a good bit of the country and kept it in cultivation,” said Pete Gober, ferret recovery coordinator for U.S. Fish and Wildlife. “Also, poisoning prairie dogs started in World War I and went into high gear for 50 years. We did away with 98 percent of the prairie dogs on the continent.”

A type of plague that arrived in California at the turn of the century also killed black-footed ferrets and prairie dogs. But there is a vaccine under development that could be administered in bait.

The last one seen in West Texas was in Bailey County in 1963, Kyle said.

Scientists caught 18 in the mid 1980s in northwest Wyoming before the last wild ones died off, and the captive breeding and reintroduction program began. It grew to become a coordinated effort of multiple agencies and zoos.

The goal is to maintain about 3,000 ferrets scattered across 12 states to allow the species to come off the Endangered Species List.

“We’d need one-tenth of 1 percent of the prairie dog habitat,” Gober said. “We have about 500 adults in the wild now. That could be accelerated with a different approach that says to landowners, ‘You can have ferrets, but if you decide to do something like farm a site, we can take them back.’ But most land use will be limited by the lack of rainfall. Highest and best use would be for grazing.”

The land proposed for the release has several prairie dog towns. There would be about 18 ferrets in the program, said Mike Atkinson, district ranger for the Kiowa and Rita Blanca National Grasslands.

Reaction has been limited so far.

“We haven’t gotten a lot of opposition, but we have had some questions,” Atkinson said. “And there’s some fear from misunderstanding. It seems there’s skepticism over things people don’t understand.”

The ferrets breed in their first year and have three or four offspring or kits each time. The captive young ferrets are kept in preconditioning pens with prairie dogs so they can learn to hunt and take shelter in their prey’s burrows. They then go into the wild.

Kyle said while the agencies are trying to address issues the public brings up, if the plan is approved, they could get their ferret allocation as soon as this fall.

When captive ferrets no longer are young enough to breed, they become educational animals. That’s where the Amarillo Zoo got its ferret about a month ago.

“We tell people he was historically part of the Panhandle,” said Rhonda Votino, zoo curator. “People don’t have a full understanding that this is a critically endangered species. They think they can go to a pet store and get one. It’s not really sinking in those aren’t even the same species.”

A special enclosure will be finished within about two weeks simulating a prairie dog town with a burrow the ferret can go into where people will be able to see it in a nesting box, Votino said.

However, there won’t be prairie dogs for breakfast.

“In captivity, they can have rats or hamsters. We raise our own rats and freeze them,” Votino said.

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